1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a printing control device, a control method for a printing device, and a control program, and relates more particularly to a printing control device, a control method for a printing device, and a control program for printing a barcode based on print data input from an application program.
2. Description of Related Art
Barcodes are widely used to identify goods and products for sale and other items (collectively referred to below as simply products).
The barcode is typically printed on the packaging of the product, or printed on a label that is applied to the product packaging, and can be read by an optical reading device called a barcode reader to capture information used for sales management and inventory management, for example. See, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-2008-040541.
A barcode printing system according to the related art is described next.
A barcode printing system typically has a printer connected to a host computer such as a personal computer or a workstation. To print a barcode the host computer sends image data for barcode printing directly to the printer, or prints through a dedication application program.
A problem with this barcode printing system of the related art is that word processors and other general purpose applications that cannot generate the image data for barcode printing cannot print a barcode.
One way to solve this problem is for application programs such as word processors to use a barcode font for barcode printing. A barcode font enables general purpose applications to handle barcodes in the same way as any other font. When a text string is passed with the font name of the barcode font to the device driver for the printer (“printer driver” below), the printer driver generates an image of the barcode instead of the text string.
More specifically, the user uses the application program to input the text string (character data such as the product number or serial number) corresponding to the one or plural barcodes to be printed, selects the barcode font corresponding to the desired barcode specification as the print font, and specifies the printing format such as the printing position and the barcode size. When the user then tells the program to print, the application program calls the printer driver and issues a print command.
This causes the printer driver to produce image data as the print data corresponding to the barcode font based on the barcode font, character data, and printing format including the print interval and size received from the application, and sends the print data to the printer.
As in the printing process described above, the printer then prints the specified barcode in the specified printing format based on the print data received from the printer driver.
When using a barcode with a variable number of digits (such as ITF (Interleaved Two of Five) or CODE128), however, the user may try to convert a text string containing plural characters (such as alphabetic letters and Arabic numerals) as a single barcode within the range that can be read by a particular barcode reader. In such cases, some application programs may split the text string to be printed into the component characters and pass the data character by character to the printer driver, and the barcode may be printed one character at a time.
For example, if the user wants to print the character data (that is, text string) “A12345” as a single barcode, the application program splits the string into the six characters A, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and passes the characters one by one to the printer driver. When this happens, a barcode that is completely different from the desired barcode is printed, or plural barcodes are printed overlapping, and the printed barcode cannot be read.